I'll admit it, I'm an RPG nut, wether it be online or off, the genre has always been my favorite to play, wether on the PC or console. For those of you like me, you may want to read up on HomeLan Fed's interview with Turbine Entertainment reguarind their upcoming title, Asheron's Call 2. Just a bit of info, AC2 is based approximately 500 years after the timeline of the first one. Snip:

HomeLAN - What will players encounter in terms of environments and setting in the game and is the world bigger than the original game?

AC2 Dev Team - Using Turbine’s G2 Engine, the environment has been made truly impressive. Trees and grass sway in the wind, weather patterns sweep across the world, and the dynamic music system lends depth and feeling to places you enter and even creatures you face.

The area of the AC2 world will be initially smaller than that of AC1; we felt that instead of spreading things out to create a world that was large simply for largeness’ sake, we wanted to focus on developing truly worthwhile, compelling content. Believe us, that's a great deal to see and many an uncharted path to take, but we wanted to remove the feeling of needlessly running hours across a vacant landscape simply to get to the next point in the game.

One feature that I absolutely loved when I first tried my hand at AC was the fact that there was no "zoning" like one may be used to in other games like EverQuest, you could run (if you so felt the need) from one end of the continent to the other. Should be interesting to see how much they'll improve this from the first one.Source:HomeLan Fed